Taste And Other Tales
By: Roald Dahl

Back when I was in secondary school (like you know, high school), it was compulsory for each and every student to take up Literature. While most of my friends from other schools said that their schools offered Literature during the last two or three years of their secondary school curriculum mostly as an elective, my school offered a choice of:

1. Core Literature with elective Geography
2. Core Literature with elective History
3. Core Geography with elective Literature

You could not escape Literature no matter how much you hated it. Thankfully for me, I loved Lit not only because I love reading and the classes were fun, I genuinely love the subject.

We did this book in Secondary One. It was our very first year being introduced to Literature and we had to do two books: a poetry and prose. I am hopeless at Poetry, hence I stuck to Prose.

Taste and Other Tales is a collection of eight of the best short stories Roald Dahl penned. They aren’t whimsical stories; they are more like stories of ordinary people doing extraordinary things. ‘Extraordinary’ things don’t necessarily mean good things.

My favourite piece is The Leg of Lamb or Lamb to the Slaughter written in 1953. It’s a simple story about a pregnant woman, and her police officer husband who told her he was going to leave her, and a leg of lamb. Click here to enjoy it and hopefully you’ll see why I love it so much.

Birth and Fate or Genesis and Catastrophe is a fictionalised account based on a true historical incident, which is the birth of a man whose name shall be known to the entire world even after his death in years to come. It tells a story of a woman Klara who just gave birth to a baby boy but feared that she might lose the baby as her three other children, Gustav, Ida and Otto had died in infancy. The doctor, in the attempts to calm her down, asked her what she’d liked her baby named. She tells him that her son would be called ‘Adolfus’. Do you know who this baby will grow up to be already?

See, textbooks aren’t so bad after all! A light read to start off the year, and the next book for February would be one of my top 3 all-time favourite book:
If You Could See Me Now by Cecelia Ahern